Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

Have I just spread counterknowledge?

The other day I reported the claim by the leading anti-Islamist blog Dhimmi Watch that Muslims in Sydney had effectively barricaded a hospital to stop the body of a young man being subjected to medical tests in contravention of Sharia law. I asked if anyone could stand up the story.

The website which reported the unconfirmed story

Since when several people have been in touch with me asking what the hell I was doing giving currency to the story before it had been properly sourced. Good question. Because no one has been able to substantiate the report and it's beginning to give off the strong whiff of an urban legend. Or – to use my own term -Â counterknowledge.

My heart sank yesterday as I read messages of support from anti-Islamist contacts of mine saying that the Australian media were too politically correct to report on the story, and that was why no Google search yielded anything. Yeah, right.

Actually, Islamic radicalism is growing in Australia – but that doesn't make the Dhimmi Watch story true. Why have no doctors, nurses or patients from the hospital come forward with eyewitness accounts?

The dynamics of blogging are different from those of newspapers; stories circulate faster and the passing on of rumour unearths scandals that are indeed ignored by "msm", to use the internet's smug shorthand for mainstream media. But untrue rumours can poison the public domain. I've just published a book arguing that point, and on this occasion I didn't practise what I preached.